Interview: Wes Anderson

A conversation with the writer-director of the new film Asteroid City.

With a cast of 100s … well, not quite, but it’s a lot of actors … Asteroid City would seem to be the most audacious film in Wes Anderson’s career. In this Daily Beast interview, Anderson has a wide-ranging conversation including the origin of the story behind the movie.

I want to start by saying that the only people more excited than me about this chat are my teenage daughters, who were raised on your films — particularly Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I’m an older father [laughs]. My daughter is only 7, and she doesn’t like Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Really?

No. She liked this new one. She came with us to the Cannes premiere, and she’s never been to anything like that before. She hasn’t sat in a cinema and seen very many movies anyway. But she told me it was her №2 movie.

After what?

Star Wars [laughs]. A New Hope, the first one.

You’re not the only person to take a backseat to Star Wars.

She also gave me an explanation for this: “I’m just very into aliens right now.” I think because of Star Wars, it’s just all space and things like that. So I wound up working in the right area, sort of…

Was your daughter’s fandom one of the reasons you chose to try your hand at sci-fi with Asteroid City?

No, she hadn’t seen Star Wars and didn’t know about any of that stuff back when we did the movie. That’s really recent. Star Wars is in the last two months, maybe. But she’s gone through quite a few of them.

Asteroid City was just something Roman Coppola and I had been talking about. For a long time, I had this thought to do something that had to do with the theater here [in New York City] when it was at its last high — its last golden moment, or something like that. The Actors Studio era and Broadway. I had something like that brewing, but obviously, it went in other directions. I feel like usually, you start with something and then it takes its own direction and you just follow it.

So exploring a new genre wasn’t the impetus for Asteroid City?

This definitely didn’t begin with saying, let’s do something sci-fi. We sort of had two things. We wanted to do something with Jason Schwartzman at the center; we had an idea of writing a role for Jason. I guess we had this feeling that it was going to be this father who’s dealing with this moment of extreme grief. Then we had the idea of doing something on a stage, and then we’d also tell the story of the play that they’re putting on, and that would be a big part of the movie.

That mixed with the idea of doing something… the name that was in our minds was Sam Shepard. We were thinking about something kind of Sam Shepard, out in the West somewhere. Then it swirled together and became this ’50s thing.

Here is a trailer for Asteroid City:

Movie website

For the rest of the Daily Beast interview, go here.

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